Remember when 60Hz to 120Hz felt like a revelation on phones? OnePlus wants you to get excited about 240Hz — a refresh rate that, until recently, you’d only find on gaming monitors designed for competitive esports players who notice the difference between 5 and 7 milliseconds of input lag.
A Gradual Climb to Absurd Numbers
According to leaks from tipster Digital Chat Station, OnePlus is eyeing a stepwise path: 165Hz first, then 185Hz, and eventually 240Hz on its flagship phones. The upcoming OnePlus 16 is rumored to land somewhere in the 165-to-185Hz range while sticking with the company’s preferred 1.5K display resolution rather than bumping up to 2K.
That resolution tradeoff tells you everything about the practical challenge here. Pushing 240 frames per second through a panel with more pixels requires more power, more processing headroom, and more aggressive thermal management. OnePlus would rather keep the resolution modest and dial up the refresh rate, at least for now.
The Battery Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About
Higher refresh rates drain batteries faster. That’s not speculation — it’s physics. The display has to wake up and redraw the screen twice as often at 240Hz compared to 120Hz. On a device that lasts a full day right now, that jump could cut meaningful time off the bottom line.
OnePlus seems to know this. The reported move to silicon-carbon batteries in the OnePlus 16, paired with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 chip, suggests the company is trying to offset the display’s hunger with a bigger battery and a more efficient processor. Whether that math actually works out in daily use is the question that leaks can’t answer.
Do You Actually Need This?
Let’s be honest: most smartphone activity doesn’t benefit meaningfully from anything above 120Hz. Scrolling Instagram, reading articles, watching videos shot at 24 or 30 frames per second — none of it gets noticeably better past a certain point. The real beneficiaries are fast-paced mobile games, and even then, the jump from 120Hz to 240Hz is far less dramatic than 60Hz to 120Hz was.
This feels like a spec-race move. OnePlus can market 240Hz as a headline number, and it’ll look impressive in a spec sheet comparison. Whether users actually perceive the difference during normal use is debatable. But if the leak is accurate, OnePlus is going to find out — and the rest of the industry will be watching closely to see whether it catches on or ends up as a footnote in the smartphone spec wars.
